Tuesday, 23 September 2008

Paper Publication

Last week I returned from Athens where I presented our paper at DIMEA 2008.I thought the presentation went well, with about 15-20 people in the audience. There were a few good questions at the end where we discussed amongst other things the use of synthetic verses naturalistic sounds for 3D spatialisation, from a semiotic point of view, and the potential of formal, structured data like VRML for environments like Second Life.

The presentation itself dealt with 3D virtual environments more generally than the paper, which uses SL as a case study. I demonstrated screen readers and AudioQuake as an example of 3D sonification in an audio game. All presentations in the conference were arranged by theme, and my paper was included in the track called "Social and Collaborative Spaces", so the emphasis of my talk was to raise awareness of the issues for blind and visually impaired users in these environments, and also to call into question just how "social and collaborative" they are when they exclude a sector of society. Following the previous day's excellent keynote by Professor Michael Meimaris, in which he talked about "Digital Natives" and "Digital Immigrants" I coined the phrase "Digital Outcasts" in the context of rapidly evolving but inaccessible technology.

Please get in touch if you'd like a copy of the paper or presentation slides.